Skip lessons in Basic. I don't care how nice RealBasic is, it is basic. I would not take you seriously if you came for interview and you only had Basic as a programming language.
Next, don't learn to program with an IDE. Learn to program from a shell, like terminal. This way you understand what is required for an application to be made. The programmers who go down the route of using an IDE ask stupid questions like, why doesn't this work, java Crap.java .
Learn an imperative language first. This doesn't automatically mean C, and if you do try to learn C first, make sure you don't skip anything that deals with pointers and memory processing.
Next learn a language that can handle the new types of program structure, like Closures. Ruby is one.
Next learn a language that is the platform choice. For Apple that is Objective-C, and soon, Objective-C 2.0.
Get yourself to as many classes as possible on programming. Abstract Data Types, Functional Programming, Searching and Sorting. And just for the hell of it, as idiots seem to be impressed by this, buy the books by Donald Knuth and put them on your shelf. You will get knowing nods from people too stupid to realise they are unreadable.
If you want to work for Apple, you need and this is not a joke, you must be in the top 1% of your class in Engineering, Computer Science, Physics, Mathematics. They don't take anyone lower. And they definately don't recruit as many people as Microsoft.
If you are just starting, I would estimate about 8 years before you get to a stage where you could call yourself a good developer.
What is a good developer? Someone who realises that a 5 line fix for a program that handles text formatting, isn't going to take 5 minutes. It might take a few weeks of servere testing to cope with left-to-right text input, multibyte text and several languages. Yes I am being sarcastic with Apple on this one, Safari 3.0 for Windows was a joke.
the link above isn't a shabby place.